also the time during which I kept my bride waiting before I married her;
and, through a coincidence that is eagerly taken advantage of by the
dream thoughts, it is also the time during which I am now keeping one of
my best patients waiting for the completion of his cure. “_What are five
years?_” ask the dream thoughts. “_That is no time at all for me—that
doesn’t come into consideration._ I have time enough ahead of me, and
just as what you didn’t want to believe came true at last, so I shall
accomplish this also.” Besides the number 51, when separated from the
number of the century, is determined in still another manner and in an
opposite sense; for which reason it occurs in the dream again. Fifty-one
is an age at which a man seems particularly exposed to danger, at which
I have seen many of my colleagues suddenly die, and among them one who
had been appointed to a professorship a few days before, after he had
been waiting a long time.
V. Another absurd dream which plays with figures, runs as follows:
_One of my acquaintances, Mr. M., has been attacked in an essay by no
less a person than Goethe, with justifiable vehemence, we all think. Mr.
M. has, of course, been crushed by this attack. He complains of it
bitterly at a dinner party; but he says that his veneration for Goethe
has not suffered from this personal experience. I try to find some
explanation of the chronological relations, which seem improbable to me.
Goethe died in 1832; since his attack upon M. must of course have taken
place earlier, Mr. M. was at the time a very young man. It seems
plausible to me that he was 18 years old. But I do not know exactly what
year it is at present, and so the whole calculation lapses into
obscurity. The attack, moreover, is contained in Goethe’s well-known
essay entitled “Nature.”_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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